Reporters rushed to parse through police records in California after new legislation made them public for the first time in nearly 50 years, but the task of filing and reviewing thousands of open-records requests was impossible for newsrooms that had seen budget cuts and lay-offs. That’s when grantees at SoCal Connected helped form the California Reporting Project, made up of some 40 news organizations across the state.
The unprecedented collaborative investigation by California newsrooms uncovered hundreds of incidents of police misconduct involving dishonesty, sexual assault, and use of force, as well as a pattern of deceit by investigators from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. The latest development stemming from their reporting is the resignation, arrest and conviction of two sheriff’s deputies who falsified evidence and then tried to cover it up.